I like how those lines rhyme, just like in a song.

Tupac Shahid Anne Sexton Erica Jong.

Let me tell you what this poem really wants:

it wants to make you slam dance and fist pump

until you crawl across a sticky club floor,

weeping with profound understanding

before you vomit in the Women’s Room sink.

It wants you to listen to it over and over and over

so that thirty years from now

whatever wayward idiocy you were up to

will come back glazed with nostalgia—

Gee, remember wandering around the golf course

hallucinating in the middle of the night,

remember the security guard at your dad’s work

finding us naked, and that guy with the knife

convinced we were insects from outer space,

those were the days, and that poem

was on everybody’s car radio, in heavy rotation.

Let’s go get the book again

and feel like we used to. Light some incense,

and a bunch of those little vanilla votives.

Come over here and ravish me

while I recite this poem word for word,

including the awesome guitar solo

I can play with this beautiful instrument

made out of nothing but air.

Bugdom

BUGDOM

Sometimes, in a certain mood, I feel bad I haven’t died yet

and I’m jealous of the people who have, the ones everyone

remembers

and fetishizes just because they’re dead. It’s the way I feel

when the phone down the hall rings for someone else

and I realize I will spend Friday night in an exotic European

capital

alone in my room, playing a computer game called Bugdom

in which a little striped beetle wanders through the electronic

grass

trying to avoid banana slugs with bulging eyes

while kicking open walnuts for magic shamrocks and strawberries.

I start to regret missing all those opportunities to die young,

to be remembered as I was at seventeen, at twenty-five, at

thirty-two.

I’m sorry I never overdosed, those years doing heroin, and that I

managed

to free climb the cliffs above the river without falling, that

later I survived

the earthquake that collapsed the bridge, clinging to the wall

in a friend’s house; I watched her best-selling books

pitch off the shelves, then went on living quietly, growing older

and less interesting every year. Let me tell you about

Bugdom, a game

that won’t let you rest: soon the enormous spear-wielding red ants

begin appearing, and if one nails you, you sit down, defeated,

before you’ve got to right yourself again and run blindly

in every direction while they chase you, all the while avoiding

the more and more numerous slugs, and searching for the walnuts

that will finally give you a red or orange key so you can enter

a new, more beautiful landscape of sunflowers

filled with flying insects in boxing gloves trying to punch your

lights out.

Next you have to swim up a river while the ants heave stones